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Depressing.. but not surprising – CIOs don’t get open source

I nearly cried over my coffee this morning, after reading this article on silicon.com which finds that British CIO’s see Open source as ‘not relevant’. As an ex-CTO I don’t find this view surprising, having attended a number of IT conferences in the UK where this attitude was all too familiar amongst the generation of IT Directors and CIO’s who view technology changes as a threat rather than a opportunity and could not tell one end of a router from a C compiler.

Come the next generation of IT managers these dinosaurs will go the way of the other dinosaurs who could not adopt to rapid environment change, this time rather than meteor impact and rapid climate change, the mass extinction will come from web based applications like salesforce.com, google apps and open source infrastructures – linux, mysql, drupal etc. and the developers trained in deploying them, who can quickly build the solutions their customers want.

Rant over – feels much better thank you !!

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

11 replies on “Depressing.. but not surprising – CIOs don’t get open source”

Ummm, in response to compliance. Please enlighten me (us) on how proprietary systems can be traced in a manner that gives transparency toward compliance – vs – Open Source, which is the ultimate transparent paradigm, making it possible to become fully compliant?

Hmmm. Different ways of thinking, I suppose. I come from an ISO background when I was mainly making a living in QA and R&D. Open Source provides a total enhancement in business compliance, where proprietary systems absolutely don’t. You have to take the proprietary outfit’s word for it – Open Source, you have it documented fully, staring at you right in the face.

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